God and Spirituality

FRIENDSHIP & GRACE 1 Human Friendship As a Channel for Grace The Story of Bill Wilson and Father Ed Dowling, S.J. by Glenn Chesnut, Human Development, Vol. 39, Issue 2, Winter 2019, pp. 96–107. Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Father Ed Dowling, S.J., were best friends for twenty years, from the time of their first meeting on a snowy night in late 1940 until Father Ed’s death on April 3, 1960. The highest kind of human friendship is often used by God as one of his most important channels for the healing and saving and empowering energy of his divine grace. Catholics believe in a sacramental universe: this means a world in which God cannot only reach out and directly touch us through the bread and wine of the mass or the water of baptism, but anywhere around us (and in and through anything else in this material universe) which he might choose to use. It is in this way that God can take what is at one level simple human friendship, but can elevate this love between two people to divine heights. All who know about the origins of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement know that by November 1934, Bill Wilson’s alcoholism had gotten totally out of control, and it appeared as though he was only going to drink himself to death. The situation seemed utterly hopeless. 2 GLENN CHESNUT Bill W. Remembering Winchester Cathedral But then there entered the first friend to re-shape Bill’s story, a sometimes drinking companion from Wilson’s younger years named Ebby Thacher, who now seemed to have miraculously gotten sober through his joining the new Christian evangelical movement called the Oxford Group.1 God’s grace had saved him, he told Bill. And at that point, Ebby became the channel through which God reached from the heavenly realm into this materialistic box of space and time in which we human beings normally live during this life, and through his grace also saved Bill Wilson’s life. Bill Wilson had been telling Ebby that calling on God’s grace would not work for him, because he was too logical and rational, and could not possibly accept the traditional Christian concept of God. But then Ebby made a simple suggestion and told Bill that if that was the problem, “Why don’t you choose your own conception of God?” And using those words as his channel, God shone the light of his grace down into Bill’s heart, and carried Bill back sixteen years in time.2 Bill W. suddenly remembered that day during the summer of 1918 when he was young artillery officer in the First World War, waiting in England to be transported over to France and thrust into the fighting. Bill had become deeply frightened at the thought of being killed or maimed on the bloody battlefields he was about to enter, until he walked into Winchester Cathedral one day. This great medieval church is situated about an hour or so’s train ride southwest of downtown London. Standing underneath the soaring Gothic arches, and staring at the ornate carvings behind the altar, as a seemingly heavenly light streamed in through the windows, Bill suddenly felt an overpowering sense of the sacred or holy. FRIENDSHIP & GRACE 3 Learning to see the holy This is an important component of what Catholics call the sacramental view of the universe: those instances when we feel God’s presence shining immediately through the materialistic walls of the physical universe and enveloping us in the sacred light from above. Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy and Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane talk about this at great length.3 We can be receiving the bread at mass in a simple parish church, visiting St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, viewing a magnificent tropical sunset along the southern Florida coast, gazing with awe over the Grand Canyon, or being present at the birth of a baby. We can learn to sense the holy while contemplating a single small flower in the grass (remembering what St. Thérèse of Lisieux said about the Little Flower). We can see the power of the holy especially illuminating the friendship between two people when they both seek God. There at Winchester Cathedral in 1918, Bill suddenly realized that the true God was not an intellectual theory our minds created as we attempted to use rationalistic arguments to understand the universe. The real ruler of the universe was not a collection of doctrines and dogmas written in a ponderous book by the dry and sterile hands of pompous philosophers and theologians. The true God was something I could feel as an overwhelming living presence, invading my heart and soul with a power which surpassed everything else in the universe. In Winchester, in England in the summer of 1918, the young army officer, overawed by his vision of the truly sacred and holy, suddenly felt all his fears and nightmares slip away, and stood there as a free man . And then he turned around and walked out of the cathedral and promptly forgot what he had experienced, and eventually took up heavy drinking after the war was over, as what 4 GLENN CHESNUT seemed an easier, simpler way — the way of chemical self- medication — than the time and labor involved in trying to live a life of prayer, meditation, and good works. Bill W.’s Conversion For sixteen years he forgot what he had learned, but now in November 1934, the words of his friend Ebby became the sacred vehicle by which God once again handed that vision of sacredness and holiness back to Bill Wilson, and he remembered once again his experience in the cathedral. But this time he clutched it to his heart and refused to let go, and was saved. This was Bill W.’s real conversion experience, he told us: “At long last I saw, I felt, I believed. Scales of pride and prejudice fell from my eyes. A new world came into view.”4 Bill Wilson was able to build on this experience to get sober, and for the next four years worked on forming a group of recovering alcoholics, and finally writing a book describing their spiritual method of calling on God’s grace to heal their bodies, minds, and souls. In April 1939 this book was published. The title on the cover was Alcoholics Anonymous, but it quickly began being referred to simply as the “Big Book.” Two friendships that lost their power Bill and Ebby continued to be friends until the end of the latter’s life in 1966, but it quickly became mostly a one-way friendship. At the beginning, Ebby served as the channel of God’s grace who saved Bill Wilson’s life. But that changed rapidly, as Ebby kept going back to alcohol over and over again. Bill remained loyal however, and continually acted as Ebby’s caretaker, putting him in treatment centers and halfway houses, and getting him sober again. Bill was the channel of grace here. And Ebby appeared to have died sober, the ultimate A.A. goal.5 FRIENDSHIP & GRACE 5 At first, during that glorious summer of 1935 while Bill Wilson was living in Dr. Bob Smith’s house in Akron and the two of them were planning out what would be the new Alcoholics Anonymous movement, Bill and Bob were friends who were as close as could be. That friendship provided a bright channel of incredible divine grace, from which the A.A. movement was born. But in the years that followed, even though the two of them continued to work cooperatively with one another at the basic level, Dr. Bob was clearly lukewarm to the writing of the Big Book (1938-39) and, later on, to the writing of the Twelve Traditions (1946–50). And there seems to me to have been no regular close sharing with one other of their deepest hopes and fears after that first summer. They did not remain truly deep friends. But friendship was the key to the most important things the two men worked out at the beginning of the A.A. movement, during the summer of 1935. The descent into apparent total failure Bill was convinced when he wrote the Big Book that it would quickly become a best seller all over the United States, and that the profits from its sales would allow A.A. to build hospitals and treatment centers, and give Bill and Dr. Bob stipends which would allow them to spend their full time working with alcoholics. But hardly any copies of the book sold. And A.A. itself was not growing very fast. By October 1940, eighteen months after the Big Book was published, there were still only 1,400 A.A. members scattered around the United States.6 The Alcoholics Anonymous movement was simply not catching on and spreading rapidly in the way that they had fantasized. And other things began to go wrong too. Bill Wilson and his wife Lois had been living in the house at 182 Clinton Street in Brooklyn, the family home where Lois had been brought up as a child. But now on April 26, 1939 (in the same month that the Big 6 GLENN CHESNUT Book was published), the bank which held the mortgage told them that they had to move out.7 It is difficult to imagine Lois’s feelings while packing everything up and leaving the place where all her childhood memories were located.

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